New York, NY (Top40 Charts) The Paranoid
Style shares "Last Night in Chickentown" the rollicking, nihilistic new ode to an all-too-powerful id, with an illustrated lyric video. "Last Night in Chickentown" is the third single from The Interrogator, the full-length album out February 2, 2024 on Bar/None.
The Paranoid
Style is also notably confirmed to open for
Drive-By Truckers in Athens, GA on February 16th at the famed 40 Watt as part of "HeAthens Homecoming."
"Last Night in Chickentown" follows October's "Print The Legend," an inspired tribute to Joe Ely from The Flatlanders, featuring backing vocals by Lisa Walker from Wussy, where
Nelson aimed to "write a song that maybe he would cover." August's foot-stomping, guitar-driven lead single "I Love the Sound of Structured Class" accompanied the album's announcement.
The Paranoid
Style - Live:
February 16, 2024 - Heathens Homecoming w/
Drive-By Truckers - Athens, GA - 40 Watt
The singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist
Elizabeth Nelson formed the DC-based band The Paranoid
Style in 2012, wedding a background in labor organizing and musical theater to her love of the of the Mekons, the Specials, Merle Haggard,
Sleater-Kinney and the Kinks. Following the word-of-mouth underground smash Rock & Roll Just Can't Recall in 2015, she signed with the legendary Hoboken indie Bar-None Records, which subsequently issued the acclaimed releases Rolling Disclosure,
Underworld USA, A Goddamn Impossible Way of Life and For Executive Meeting.
She has been profiled in the New Yorker and praised by NPR, Rolling Stone, Spin and the Dean Of American Rock Criticism Robert Christgau.
Nelson also is a decorated journalist and regular contributor to The New Yorker (this deep dive into The Replacements' Tim: Let it Bleed Edition is a must-read), the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Oxford American, The Wall Street Journal and The Ringer on the topics of music, sports, film and television, and politics. In 2023, legendary pop-icon
Peter Holsapple (co-founder of The dB's) joined the Paranoid
Style on a full-time basis as lead guitarist.
13 songs over 41 brash, hilarious, terrifying and poignant minutes, The Interrogator sounds something like Elvis Costello's mid-career masterpiece Blood & Chocolate as reimagined by Eliminator-era ZZ Top. Laced with malign landlords, nighttime debauchery, tedious group chats, banana splits and felony murder, no single album of 2024 will better capture the hectic, nervous, dislocating, end-of-Democracy-precipice that is our exhilarating brief. Glam rock for the end times.
According to
Elizabeth Nelson: "For as long as I can remember, I've been obsessed with the sound of ZZ Top's 1983 LP Eliminator, which was the outcome of Billy Gibbons' incipient fascination with
Depeche Mode and Orchestral Maneuvers In the Dark, and his desire to embroider the sound of those bands onto the Top's inimitable
Texas boogie. To me it sounds like heaven.
When I realized the success of our previous records meant we were going to have a bigger budget for The Interrogator, I immediately huddled with my engineer and co-producer Jason Richmond and told him this was the sonic direction I thought we should go in. He happily agreed and it was all Fairlight synthesizers all the time from there. All the tracks have the Eliminator DNA, but I have to say I think we really nailed it on this one. Special shout out to
Peter Holsapple for a blistering solo that would make Gibbons himself wave his cowboy hat in Peter's direction just to help him cool off."
Nelson goes on to add: "{"I Love The Sound Of Structured Class"} is about the kind of deals that make the world go around, and the sorts of folks who make them. A lot of people think they know the face of good and evil, because they think it was shown to them on TV. Or maybe they think they learned about it in their church or community center. But these things don't show themselves so easily as all that. There's a lot of operating and engineering that takes place, the very nature of which does not draw attention to itself.
The narrator of this song might be good or she might be bad- I'm not in a position to make that sort of judgment. I would say she deals in real life, in whatever needs doing. You could say that the world requires a certain order, and maybe she is in charge of helping to keep it. On the other hand, that order is arbitrary and often cruel.
There is nothing in the Book Of Revelations or
Paradise Lost anywhere near as frightening and sinister as the self-sustaining, perpetual motion machine of the modern economic caste system, and the bloodless, unstoppable systems which fuel it. Like the narrator says: 'Sympathy for the devil is the last of your concerns.'"
